


Think Less

by KatyaMorrigan



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Holding Hands, Kaz being soft but only for Inej, Kissing, because they are work partners and reluctant friends before anything else, some light Kanej banter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27249025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatyaMorrigan/pseuds/KatyaMorrigan
Summary: Kaz and Inej work through Kaz's busy thoughts to allow themselves a first kiss. Turns out Kaz needs to be more in touch with his feelings - and he's not good at having feelings.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 10
Kudos: 91





	Think Less

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first oneshot for my NaNoWriMo writing challenge this year - one oneshot a day, every day for the whole of November. I'm following the SOFTober 2020 prompts by @wafflesandkruge on Instagram to give me some fluffy starting points for the coming month of fics.
> 
> The prompt for today was "kiss".  
> I hope you enjoy!

“I think you are overthinking this,” Inej said gently, resting her hands on her knees. Kaz gave a rueful smile.

“I don’t have any other type of thinking. It’s either all or nothing.”

“Might I suggest we go for the brainless option then?”

“You don’t want to know stupid Kaz.”

“I might like him more than chronically anxious Kaz.”

“You like chronically anxious Kaz plenty, now leave him be.” Chronically anxious Kaz was still grinning from his desk, one arm leant on the back of his chair, but Inej could see that he was still struggling with her suggestions.

“You are absolutely right, but I really don’t think that talking about kissing would be this painful if your brain just shut up for a second and let you feel things.”

Kaz looked like she had just legitimately suggested a lobotomy.

“It’s kind of the point with kissing that you don’t think about things and just focus on how you feel,” she continued. “If you let your brain take a backseat for a minute or two, I think it would be much easier for us to manage this.”

“You say that like thoughts and feelings aren’t equally scary,” he replied with a distasteful grimace.

“I cannot believe I am still considering kissing you after you say things like that.”

“More fool you,” came his sardonic voice as Kaz turned his chair away again, focusing once more on the papers scattered over his desk.

Inej was sat at the end of his bed, a mat laid out on her knees as she cleaned her knives. Each of her pristine blades rested on the soft leather carrying pouch that had been rolled out flat, and they all reflected narrow rectangles of light coming in from the window beside Kaz’s desk. They were sat together in his attic room, Kaz focused on the gently amassing paperwork that he would rather ignore, and Inej making sure her knives weren’t rusting between sea voyages. She would rather lose a limb than be without her ranks of blades throughout her pirating ventures, but the salty air was not kind to her handcrafted fleet and only the one Grisha-made knife was showing no negative affects from the months of damp.

She gave another swipe of her cleaning cloth along the face of Sankt Petyr, holding it close to her face and checking for the small flecks of oxidised metal that she was determined to remove. Her own eyes stared back at her from the silver blade, dark buttons squared to the knife’s shape as she intently checked it for more water damage.

Kaz made good company for mindless tasks like this: he was quiet most of the time, didn’t like to distract her, and rarely looked up from his own work except when conversation dominated their collective focus. They had been talking about their dedicated attempts to one day be able to do more than sit in silence six feet apart, and that was when Kaz started talking more about his own fears and phobias holding him back. It was no secret between the two of them that they were both severely traumatised anymore, but it still wasn’t something either of them discussed much – much less that Kaz be the one to open up. As he said himself, feelings were not his strong point.

But there had been progress. An arm around Inej’s shoulder, her resting against him on Wylan and Jesper’s sofa, occasionally a hand held without the need for Kaz’s gloves. They often slept in the same bed now, Kaz wrapped in layers of nightclothes to ensure there was no skin-to-skin contact during the night, but it allowed them both to get used to another body beside them in the dark, and the warmth that came from knowing someone they could trust was right there.

Kaz still struggled the most though. It was his overactive thoughts that prevented him from trying more than he was already comfortable with, and Inej never liked to push him into attempting things before he was ready. Her demons were waiting for more intimate moments between them that were definitely not on the table yet anyway, but it meant that she was still waiting a little for Kaz to play catch-up. She didn’t mind at all – at this point, she found it complimentary that he was so lost in his feelings for her – and Inej was used to the constantly overworking mind of Kaz Brekker.

Unable to hold back a sigh, she screwed up her face and fell back on the bed, spreading her arms out as she met the mattress. Inej’s eyes hurt from the close attention to her knives’ blades, but she couldn’t let them wear out.

“Please don’t throw yourself on the bed with a lapful of knives,” Kaz said politely.

“We have both done plenty more dangerous things than that.”

“I don’t want a punctured mattress or a punctured Wraith.”

“Ah yes, the order of priorities: the bed of an insomniac, and the girl he wishes he didn’t care about.” Inej grinned to herself as she closed her eyes. Teasing Kaz was all too easy, and he only made it easier. There was no response from the desk, and she assumed that he had simply gone back to the list of Crow expenses and was giving himself a headache over the maths.

She was laid back, her hand still had Sankt Petyr resting lazily in it, and the knives on her lap had settled into the dip of her legs. It was not bright in the room, but Inej still sensed the shift in light as footsteps stopped by the end of the bed. She opened her eyes and saw Kaz stood over her, arms folded across his chest. His expression was difficult to read at the best of times, but right now he was especially inscrutable. There were a number of thoughts that Inej had about what he might say: the easy option was to respond to her joke as a joke, to rib her back for the teasing. But part of her wondered if he might say something else. If his mind was still giving him hell over the thought of kissing her, and if he might divert the conversation back to that. Maybe she was the one overthinking things now.

Kaz sighed.

“Caring about you undoubtedly makes my life more difficult,” he started.

Inej grinned. “You really know how to make girls feel better about themselves.” He frowned at her, and reached out a gloved hand. Inej took it with her empty hand and sat up carefully, making sure Sankt Petyr didn’t catch on the bedspread. Kaz did not appear tall against the rest of the Crows, but when he was the only one in the room with her, Inej was reminded of just how small she really was compared to him. She was sat while he stood, and even with a lapful of knives, it wasn’t a balanced interaction.

“It’s difficult trying to quieten my thoughts when you are most of them,” he admitted.

Inej felt herself flush just a little. It was very rare for Kaz to be this honest even during deep conversations, and it was unheard of for him to volunteer intimacies like this during a friendly exchange.

“I want to kiss you, so much,” he said, “but every single time we almost do my head is just full of fears and of you, and I can’t focus on what I’m doing in that moment. I can shut myself up other times, but this is the one occasion where I really can’t make my brain slow down.”

He was looking at her with quiet earnest, gloved hands hugging his ribs, in a way that made Inej ache on the inside. What made these moments all the more special was that he was doing the thing he feared most – being vulnerable – for her, so that she knew he was working as hard as he could. She gave him a warm smile.

“And yet you don’t think being brainless would help.” Kaz returned her smile.

“Would you mind putting away your knives so I can sit beside you?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

Kaz helped her to collect up the blades, gently lifting the ones from her lap and sliding them into the leather roll-up beside the two that had been on the bed. Inej tied the straps of the case, and laid it gently on the floor. As she did so, Kaz lowered himself onto the bed, bracing himself with his hands so that his bad leg didn’t seize with the change of stance.

They sat side by side for a second, Inej looking at her hands in her lap. They were faintly grey from the polish she had used on Sankta Lizabeta, but apart from the metallic shine they looked as they always did. Inej felt a shuffle of movement as Kaz removed a glove. He extended his hand to her, slipping it into her silvery fingers and catching his breath only slightly as Inej entwined their grasps.

“Bored of paperwork?” she asked lightly, looking at the boy beside her. Kaz’s face flattened for a moment as he took her teasing, again.

“Of course. There’s no other reason I might want to side beside you and hold your hand for a moment.” His deadpan expression was always most helpful in these exchanges, and Inej couldn’t help laughing.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to say you wanted to.”

“That’s what you think.”

This time the joke was still edged with a little of Kaz’s continual regret, of all the things he struggled to say. All the things he struggled to do. Inej didn’t mind, though. It didn’t matter that he found it hard to say he loved her, sometimes, or to ask for something when he wanted it. The thing that stuck out to her as being as romantic as a public proposal was that he did those things that scared him anyway. He had told her he loved her before, and he would tell her again. Inej would feel him pull her closer in his sleep, and see the way he looked at her when her eyes flicked back to his after a moment of diverted attention. His love for her was everywhere, and especially in the things he struggled to do for her.

Kaz squeezed her hand briefly, and Inej squeezed too. The backs of his hands were lightly textured under her sensitive fingers, uneven from the lattice of scars and the thick veins that became more prominent when he was nervous – like now.

Inej looked at Kaz’s face, and saw his expression falter. His coffee cup eyes never stopped being dangerously beautiful – not that you ever called someone like Kaz beautiful. She shuffled a little closer to him so that their thighs lay against each other, and rested her head on his shoulder. Kaz sighed happily, and slipped his hand from hers so that he could wind an arm around her waist. It was a firm and comforting weight against her body, the warmth of him around her middle.

The fact that silence was easy between them meant that there was no expectation in moments like this. There was no rush to move, or do more. Inej could sit in his loose embrace like this, and nothing else had to happen.

“What is your brain doing now?” she asked softly. Kaz inhaled slowly.

“Telling me to make my mind up and commit to what I want to do.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“I’m not going to tell you. I haven’t committed to it yet.” Inej huffed out a laugh.

“Are you going to commit to what your brain tells you?”

“No.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you reckon I should try leading with feeling rather than thought.”

Inej stilled beside him. Warmth was blooming in her chest.

“I’m trying to ignore my brain telling me to just do it, and wait until I feel it.”

“That sounds like an excellent plan, my dear.” She sat for just a moment, feeling Kaz’s shoulder lift with his breathing. “Is there anything you need me to do to make this easier?”

“Can I hold your hand again?”

Inej smiled and lifted her closest hand to his. Kaz kept his other arm around her, holding her closely and in an almost romantic way. It was easy to picture how they were sat right now, and Inej couldn’t help smiling again at the thought of them, how they were just here, together.

She felt the slight tremor of Kaz’s hand moving, and she went to let go of him. But he kept their fingers entangled as he lifted his hand up towards him. It wasn’t slow, but Inej felt every moment of it so minutely that it could have been an hour. Kaz turned his hand over, bringing the back of Inej’s hand up to his mouth, and pressed a soft kiss to her knuckles. He didn’t let go and he didn’t move away; Kaz just held Inej’s hand to his lips for one more inward breath before lowering it to his lap.

How could someone as rough and uncertain as Kaz be so tender and gentle with her? Inej was speechless. She lifted her head from his shoulder, and turned to look at him.

“May I touch your face?” she asked, as careful as Kaz now to make sure it wouldn’t hurt either of them.

Kaz swallowed before giving a shy “yes”. She shifted against him, turning to rest her weight on one arm so that she could face Kaz as she raised the hand he had kissed to cup his cheek. Her hands were warm with the blush that was threatening to spread over her face just as Kaz now was, his normally pale skin blooming in this newfound affection. He leaned into her palm, and Inej brushed her thumb over the soft swell of his cheekbone, bringing a wider smile to his lips. There was nothing sweeter than seeing the man who made Ketterdam dangerous blush and smile in the hands of the smallest girl in the gang. Kaz swallowed nervously and moved on the bed, shifting his weight sideways to put himself closer to Inej. Her hand slid from his cheek to the back of his neck, and now their faces were very close. Inej knew her breath was pressing against Kaz’s lips the way his was against hers, and she knew he was feeling that same urge.

“Only if you’re sure,” she breathed, seeing his eyes flick from her slightly open mouth back up to her eyes. There was a furrow between his brows, but as he blinked once, it seemed to disappear. A slight smirk fitted itself to his lips.

“Not thinking anymore.”

Kaz leaned forwards and kissed her. Inej’s chest swelled with warmth at the surprise, and she held onto the back of his neck, leaning into the soft press of his mouth, of his gentle lips.

It was a lingering peck, a simple push from the two of them, but as Inej pulled away with the next breath, he followed her back and kissed her again. She couldn’t help it – Inej gave a small laugh against his mouth, wrapping her arms around him as Kaz’s kissing became more insistent, more inquisitive. It was impossible to move away from. They were together now, and it felt like they could never be apart.

After a few minutes, Kaz finally pulled away with a hot exhale and looked at her with bright eyes. His mouth moved, but no words came out.

“You did it,” Inej grinned.

“We did.” He looked at her like he had never seen her before, eyes wide with wonder exploring her face in a way that would have made her blush had her face not already felt brilliantly warm.

“It was okay?” he asked, checking her face for any signs of unhappiness. She laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

“It was lovely. And you’re okay?”

“I don’t think my head has ever been that empty,” he confessed, running his bare fingers up and down her sleeve.

“Ah, No-Brain Brekker. We have found the way.” Inej’s smile made him sigh, but the look he returned was one of pure joy.

“We’ve found the way.” And then they kissed.

**Author's Note:**

> Not entirely sure how I feel about this one - I very much like it but still feel it was a little rushed. I guess that's gonna be the nature of posting something every day for a month. Constructive criticism is very much appreciated, and let me know generally what you think!  
> Tomorrow's prompt is "falling", and will be another Kanej fic.


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